Free Market Friday: Obamacare failure hurts Oklahomans

It seems like a long time ago, but it was just 2009 when our country was roiled by debates over what became known as Obamacare.

President Obama argued that more government control would create more choices and lower costs. Opponents said the new entitlement program would do just the opposite and, in the end, hurt the people it was supposed to help.

Two recent developments show that opponents were correct. And while the failure of Obamacare harms Oklahomans, we can thank some of our state legislators for minimizing the damage.

This week, Aetna announced it will pull out of at least 11 of the 15 state exchanges. The major insurance company stopped selling plans in Oklahoma in 2014, but had been planning a return to our state’s exchange. Now, Oklahoma is officially set to join the ranks of states with just a single company “competing” in the health insurance exchange.

The week before, the federal government finally admitted the cost of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. The actual cost is 49 percent higher than predictions made by the Obama administration and provided to Congress and the public. This means more federal spending, a larger national debt, and higher future costs for states that adopted the Medicaid expansion.

Imagine how much worse Oklahoma’s state financial picture would be if legislators had surrendered to demands from the Obama administration and Oklahoma Health Care Authority to expand Medicaid here. OHCA’s most recent plan was to raise taxes, push thousands of women and children out of Medicaid into the failing Obamacare exchange, and offer Medicaid to a new population of able-bodied adults. Just like the Obama administration, OHCA used unrealistically low estimates of how many people would sign up and how much each would cost.

The new cost numbers from the federal government are one more reminder that OHCA’s plan would have been a budget disaster. It would have hit not just taxpayers, but other areas of the budget, like education. Worse, it would have spread state welfare dollars so thin that the most needy would get less care, even if still technically covered.

Oklahoma legislators have so far stood up against Obamacare. Rather than expanding welfare to more able-bodied adults, they have preserved Medicaid for its original purpose of providing care for the most needy among us.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (www.ocpathink.org).